CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) – The West Virginia Senate Judiciary Committee held a listening session on the child welfare system’s challenges Monday morning, ahead of a week when the committee is set to focus on reforming it. The system currently has about 6,000 children, according to the Child Welfare Dashboard.

The committee heard from parents who have dealt with the state’s child welfare system, as well as those formerly inside the system, about what they believe needs to be changed.

“We want to hear your stories, and as we go through the bills this week on CPS and child welfare, what you share with us this morning is going to help us create better policy,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Tom Willis (R-Berkeley) told attendees.

“After four and a half years of fighting, I lost my son,” Tanya Shresbury told the committee, saying CPS made false accusations against her. “I’ve missed birthdays, Christmases, everything. I’ve had six supervisors that have done visits with me. They all tell ‘em they’re great. Me and my little boy, we have a great connection. But when it comes to the judge seeing those reports … CPS no longer has them.”

Pat McKinney told the committee about his experience with CPS, in which he fought successfully to keep his daughter and son, calling it a “nightmare.”

McKinney told WSAZ he came to the meeting in hopes the agency will prioritize keeping children in family or close friends’ homes, rather than a new environment. That hope was echoed in several others’ addresses to the committee.

“If there’s an alternative, keep them in that family supportive environment,” McKinney said. “When you take a kid, you put them in an alien environment that they feel no support. My kids were so traumatized that if you walked up the sidewalk with a lanyard on, they hid. And we don’t need that. We need to stop taking kids.”

Some speakers were not parents, but advocates or former members of the system. Former state Sen. Mark Drennan, now the president of the West Virginia Behavioral Healthcare Providers Association, laid out what changes to CPS he would prioritize.

“If we want to fix the child welfare system in West Virginia, here’s what we need to look at,” Drennan told the committee. “No more children in hotels, fewer children being served out of state, more foster homes available for those children that need them, more children safely with their biological and kinship families, and more young, resilient adults aging with natural, lifelong connections. That’s what success looks like to me.”

After the hearing, Willis told WSAZ the committee will spend all week on reforms for the child welfare system, calling the current state of the system a “crisis.”

“At least from a legal perspective, we want to do everything we can to protect West Virginia kids and make sure they’ve got the best chance possible,” he said. “How can we set up systems so that the parents have a fair chance, and the children have a fair chance? Then we’ve got the most just system possible.”

Some of the reforms the committee is considering this week include: Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s “Bring Them Home” fund, a plan that aims to reduce the number of children within the child welfare system with behavioral or mental health needs that are sent to out-of-state facilities for care; working with more non-profits to ease the case management load; and implementing audio recording of CPS meetings with parents, children, and home visits.

“We’ve heard a lot of ‘he said, she said’ across the state, where we’ve heard parents would say what they heard in court wasn’t actually what happened, or what was said by the child or by the parent in the home or in a meeting,” Willis explained to WSAZ. “And so we’re looking at doing audio recordings with CPS workers to maintain accountability and transparency, especially for the court proceedings, because it’s such a critical issue, this removal decision.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee will meet daily at 3 p.m. to discuss and move the bills, which Willis estimates to be “in the ballpark of 15” in total. Meetings are streamed online.

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West Virginia online casino revenue continues to climb.

During January WV online casinos produced approximately $41.7 million in revenue for the month.

It is a new monthly high for the Mountain State, which has not previously crossed $40 million mark.

Compared to January last year, revenue is up over 40%.

How January Revenue is Tabulated

The West Virginia Lottery releases weekly revenue reports on iGaming through their website, so there are not clear-cut monthly totals, but you can get a good approximation of how things are.

Reports are slotted by the ending of each week, Here’s how each looked.

• Week ending Jan. 3: $9,205,916 (averages to 3,945,392 for three days)
• Week ending Jan. 10: $8,584,305
• Week ending Jan. 17: $8,107,821
• Week ending Jan. 24: $8,310,714
• Week ending Jan. 31: $8,823157
• Total: $41,716,782

In January 2025, West Virginia brought in about $29.8 million in iGaming revenue. That’s a 40% increase year-over-year.

With the 15% tax rate on the revenue, $6.3 million was generated for the state through January’s online casino play.

West Virginia iGaming Approaching New Milestone

Even though February is the shortest month of the year, the revenue may not take much of a step back.

The first week of February online casino data is already filed and it produced $9,856,344 in revenue. That’s a new weekly record for the state and the closest it has come to reaching $10 million for a single week.

Prior to August, West Virginia had never reached more than $8 million in iGaming revenue for a week. It has now surpassed that in seven consecutive weeks and in 13 of the last 15 weeks.

During that same stretch, West Viriginia has topped $9 million in weekly revenue four times.

It will not be long before $10 million in weekly revenue becomes a regular part of WV online casino data. By the end of 2026, that number could be climbing to $12 million or higher. The peak at the end of 2024 was just under $7 million. That grew to a peak of $9.7 million in 2025.